Blog 3: Assessing Critical Thinking
by Jenny Krystopowicz, Van Ness Elementary teacher
In my first two blogs I asked you to think about a time during childhood or more recently, when you made, invented, or altered something and the challenges that may have occurred during your making experience. It is likely you used some capacity of critical thinking to meet your end making goal. Now think about if you had to rate yourself while making, what would you use to measure your success? How much you learned? Your persistence? Your awareness? Would you consider yourself to be a critical thinker if you didn’t meet your end goal? In any case, measuring critical thinking is not an easy task and there are many variables that can come into play.
Learning While Making is a method of teaching I use in the classroom to support the development of critical thinking. Learning While Making has allowed me to integrate the recommended strategies to support critical thinking in the learning environment since it encompasses targeted, purposeful hands-on making experiences that are designed to engage students in multi-sensory and interdisciplinary learning. It empowers students to take on the role as a maker where they build, create, design or produce while developing transferable skills that will improve learning across all disciplines.
Assessing Critical Thinking in the Classroom
I will be measuring student levels of critical thinking through their ongoing “Authentic self” projects. These projects were designed for students to discover their true sense of self through making experiences that ask students to build, create, design or produce a product that directly relates to their own interests.
To assist in students discovering their interests, I used guidance from Angela Duckworth’s award-winning book Grit. In her book she highlights that finding interest, practice, purpose, and hope in one’s work can improve his or her own level of grit. Students are first asked to think about the following to help find their areas of passion so that they will sustain interest while completing their project:
What do I like to think about?
What do I care about?
What matters most to me?
How do I enjoy spending my time?
What do I find absolutely unbearable?
Objectives of the study, research questions, hypotheses:
During my research study, I will be investigating if providing my students with the opportunity to work on their own “authentic self” making projects following Learning While Making’s stages will improve two traits that research identifies as a critical thinker: perseverance and reflective capacity.
Once students have determined their focus for their “authentic self” project, they cycle through a structured series of Making Stages I created that organically embeds the development of critical thinking. The purpose of these stages is for students to understand that learning is a process that involves researching, questioning, analyzing, and reflecting. While there is no deadline for a stage to be complete, the average cycle usually takes between 2-3 months to complete given students work on their project every three days.
The following are the Making Stages that students complete during their project cycle:
Stage 1: Prewrite
Students complete graphic organizer where they generate a question to an idea or interest, think about ideas for their product in how they will introduce their authentic self, and what materials they want to incorporate. Student must get teacher feedback and final approval to move onto stage 2.
Stage 2: Draft the Product
Students begin using the materials to build, create, design, or produce their product. Students can conduct additional research if necessary and ask peers for support.
Stage 3: Edit and Revise Draft Product
Students use their provided checklist to ensure that they have fully represented him or herself in their product, make any necessary corrections or updates, and check for clarity.
Stage 4: Peer Feedback
Students follow their peer feedback protocol to support each other’s product. Students ask a classmate to review draft product using a peer feedback protocol forms.
Stage 5: Publish Your Product
Students use their peer feedback to make any necessary changes. Students follow checklist to ensure all components of their product are ready to share.
Stage 6: Share
Students will share their product with class and then complete the reflection form on how their “Authentic Self” project helped them discover their true self. This is also an opportunity for students to reflect on their successes and future steps.
It is my hypothesis that in cycling through the Making Stages will nurture the following critical thinking skills:
Perseverance (as described from Wabisabi Learning): Critical thinkers know the necessity of staying on task. It is not their nature to give up until a solution is formulated, a process is determined, or a decision is reached.
Reflective Capacity (as described from Wabisabi Learning): When engaging in critical thinking, one isn’t focused on just stopping after the outcome. Instead, a critical thinker reflects on the learning journey and pinpoints apparent areas for improvement, while also recognizing new applications for synthesized knowledge and ideas. A critical thinker never ignores mistakes but doesn’t dwell on them either. A critical thinker learns, internalizes, and moves on to the next challenge.
Setting, Sample, and Selection:
I will select 8-10 students through purposive sampling to track while they work on their authentic self-projects during the months of January through April. Authentic self-projects take place during class center time in the Innovation Center. Students rotate through our Innovation Center every three days for thirty minutes.
Research design/Methodology:
To measure perseverance I will use Angela Duckworth’s Grit Scale. I will give students the scale prior to starting their authentic self-project, as well as at the completion of their project. I will compare pre and post scores to see if there was an overall improvement. While the scales were originally designed to assess individual differences rather than subtle within-individual changes in behavior over time, this scale is extremely helpful to identify components of perseverance (a trait of critical thinking) from pre and post student making experiences.
To measure reflective capacity, I will use a modified version of the Drawing Conclusions rubric from Wabisabi Learning. To identify whether students were able to show awareness of mistakes and areas for growth and improvement as they progress through the making stages, I will score student reflection forms in Making Stages 2, and then Making Stage 6.
I look forward to documenting the data and sharing my observations in my next blog!